Rampant

Did he really mean that? Would he have been interested if she’d been staying elsewhere and none of this had happened? She stared at him for the longest moment. “I’m not normally as full-on and crazy as this.”

“I guessed that you’d be a little bit more cautious about leaping into bed with a stranger.”

She flashed him a look. “I don’t mean that so much. If I wanted to have a relationship, I can go out and meet someone. It’s more than that. It’s as if Annabel planted a need to know inside me, a need to know that goes beyond the sex, though. Does that make sense?”

Grayson observed her, thoughtfully. “The visions?”

She nodded. “Yes, it’s as if she really is sharing something with me. She wants me to know.”

“Cain’s hex could be made to work that way, but I can’t imagine him being quite so subtle when it comes to his victim’s experience of an enchantment.”

She swallowed down the dread that statement filled her with, pushing it away. “No, it’s not about Cain. I simply want to know what happened to her. I think I want to know as much as you do, and I think she wants me to know, as well. She wants the truth to come out.”

“Why?”

“You’re asking me?”

“Just playing devil’s advocate.” There was humor in his eyes. Even so, it sent a shiver down her spine.

“Don’t say such things.”

“I’m sorry. The question is why would she want you to know. It could be that she needs her story to be told, in order to move on and finally break with the real world. If so, Cain has wandered into that situation with his own project.”

“It might explain why I don’t feel as if she’s the enemy in all of this.” She sighed. “It would be good to get some distance. I wish I could get away, just for a little while. I’m so confused by all of this.”

Especially you.

All she really wanted was to stay in his arms, to make love to him again, to chat over long dinner dates and get to know every little thing about him.

“I need to know which of the feelings that I’m feeling…are mine. If you see what I mean.” She delivered the statement with more conviction than she felt. Saying that to him was hard, because mostly her concern was what she was feeling about him. Questions about Annabel echoed through her mind constantly, but for her it was increasingly bound up with Grayson as well. She gazed up at him, glad that they were together again.

Did Annabel really have such a powerful call on both those men? she wondered as she looked at him. It was an intriguing question. Even at her lowest, when her master could so easily have cast her aside, Annabel wove a spell over him that had nothing to do with magic. The inherent power of desire, of love? Zoë wondered if she could ever have that kind of power over a man, the way Annabel had.

Grayson meshed his fingers with hers when she touched his hand. “We’ll go to Abernathy. I need to seek advice about the binding spell. We must try to understand the nature of your attachment to Annabel, so we can undo it. It’s just along the coast,” he continued. “It’s the village you can see when you’re on the cliff path.”

Zoë remembered the sight of the other village on the horizon and how tempting it had looked. “I’ll be pulled back, I know I will.”

“If it upsets you, we’ll turn back. The villages are separated only by the cliffs. My mother’s side of my family hails from that part of the world.”

He’d told her about his parents, but she hadn’t realized they were this close to his mother’s home. She began to make more sense of his presence here. “That sounds good. I’d like that.”

“I’m sure it’ll help you to see how a decent coven goes about things. Besides, I owe a visit.”

Some small part of her wondered if meeting even more witches was going to help, but she trusted him. “I’ll pack my stuff.”

“I’ll tidy the kitchen and we can be on our way.”

“Deal.”

When she got into the bedroom, she stared over at her half-unpacked suitcase with a smile. The fact that she hadn’t unpacked properly was going to save her time, and that amused her no end. Drifting around the room, she picked up her bits and pieces, tossing them across the room in the direction of the suitcase. The bizarre part was that she was packing when she was only halfway into her stay, because she was moving next door. And that was because that house was protected by magic and this one was not. If it weren’t for the fact that she’d seen it all with her own eyes, and other people had seen it, too, she’d think she was going insane.

After she grabbed her bathroom gear, she sat at the dresser and picked her jewelry and makeup, dropping bits and pieces into her makeup purse. The items were scattered all over the dresser, from her last hasty exit. Each time she sat at the dresser she seemed to have to race away.

The thought made her pause, and when she did, tension shot up her spine. Inside a heartbeat the atmosphere in the room changed. Was that because she had thought about it, or had it been like that when she walked in?

Lifting her head, she forced herself to look in the mirror. She thought about the other time she had sat here and the ghostly apparition that she had seen.

“Annabel?” she whispered, her voice faltering on the name. Still nothing in the mirror. But the atmosphere in the room had definitely changed, it was slightly warmer and she felt a presence, just as she had when she first arrived in the house, only this time it was much more obvious to her.